Promoting Good Governance in Eastern Europe – Domestic Responses to External Influences

Svein Eriksen Statskonsult, Oslo

Paper presented at the 14 NISPA Annual Conference, Ljubljana, May 11th-13th 2006

1Introduction

The post 1989 transitions may be seen as massive transfers of material resources, know-how, and political and economic models from the West to the East of Europe. The process is driven both by demand and supply – by the desire of Eastern countries to obtain Western assistance and membership in Western institutions and by a readiness in the West to support and influence developments in the East.

Unlike the revolutions of 1776, 1789, and 1917 the upheavals of 1989 were essentially apolitical and not the harbingers of ideological innovations (Vachudova and Snyder 1997). Instead, the transition countries have aspired to re-establish normal societies following Western norms and to be recognized by the West as modern societies (Offe 1997).

The universal emphasis on a ‘return to Europe’ and the extent of Western involvement may seem to indicate that the range of strategic options and policy alternatives open to transition countries is strictly limited, and that by and large the well-known Western form of democracy and market economy predestines their choices of political paths to follow.

Theorists of post-communist economic change have presumed that the higher efficiency of market systems would automatically propel the Eastern countries in a market direction and that the inherited economic systems of the East would play no role in the future, since like water and oil the established systems and the future systems would not blend (Rona-Tas 1998).

According to this paradigm the transition process is driven by a vision of the journey’s end rather than recollections of its starting point. The future is to be built on and not with the ruins of the past.

However, the weight of the evidence accumulated over the post-1989 period does not support the thesis that the transition countries are following the same path of development or sharing a common end station. The dominant pattern of post socialism has been one of variation, not uniformity, and the ways in which new institutional patterns have been introduced in the East differ significantly from the processes of modernisation in the West. Thus, students of the transition process argue that

  • Eastern countries have chosen distinctly divergent models of government and devoted varying levels of attention to reform issues (Verheijen 1999)
  • Eastern countries have often feigned rather than implemented Western standards (Janos 2005)
  • the choices of economic policies differ across Eastern Europe (Zuzowski 2000); in some countries it is not an easily recognizable form of capitalism that is developing, but a flawed, deviant model (Poznanski 2001).

The diversity of transitional paths and the discrepancies between Western institutional prototypes and Eastern imitations indicate that transition processes are only partly shaped by external factors. This paper argues that foreign influence on national transformations works through and is conditioned by domestic governmental arrangements. A post-communist country is not a tabula rasa or a blank pagethat can be inscribed with foreign ideas. Such ideas will be ignored, interpreted, accepted or rejected in consequence of for example domestic leadership, patterns of public administration or cultural orientation.

The argument is based on findings and assumptions from various strands of social science research.

Though the EU confronts member countries with a shared set of values and patterns, empirical studies on the extent of EU-ization of member states’ governments have revealed neither the emergence of a single European administrative model nor the convergence of the various national models. Indeed, the continuation of divergence is the key finding of such studies. A common challenge for all member governments is to find ‘translator devices’ (Bulmer and Burch 2005, p. 854) so that business emanating from the EU can be managed according to well-established, domestic forms of governance.

The argument that the effect of external influences is conditioned on domestic factors is often made in studies of globalisation. For instance, the fact that Central and Eastern European countries have enjoyed economic growth and the successor states to the Soviet Union economic decline in the age of globalisation and multinational companies is ascribed to cross-national differences in i.a. political stability, communication infrastructure, and social value patterns (Berend 2005).

An understanding of historical legacies provides important insight. Historians argue that there is a long-term pattern of influences going from the West to the East of Europe and a pattern of response in the East to social developments of the West conditioned by domestic factors – some of which date several centuries back and have shown strong resilience (Heppner 1995).

Students of the Soviet hegemony have analysed variations and similarities among the former communist countries in terms of two sets of characteristics of the Eastern Bloc; the interests and resources of the Soviet Union, and the resilience of domestic structures in each of the satellite states (Janos 2001). The same line of reasoning may be a guide to understanding post 1989 transition processes, where a cultural divide between countries in the East Block influencing the extent of Soviet hegemony seems to affect the current ability of the EU to achieve cross-national harmonization of policies.(Janos 2001).

The impact of developmental aid on domestic capacity building varies considerably across nations and geographic regions. For instance, the effect of World Bank projects on institutional development in Africa has been significantly lower than for comparative projects worldwide. This discrepancy has been attributed to domestic factors, particularly national political leadership. While country leadership on capacity building has been strong in some countries it has been weak in others (World Bank 2005).

This paper aims at demonstrating how three aspects of government in transition countries – political leadership, administrative structure and cultural orientation – affect the extent to which these countries are penetrated by outside influence or profit from external assistance in the area of public administration.

It must be emphasised, however, that the question of the impact of foreign actors on domestic development is a relational issue, involving at least three parties – the recipient, the donor and the capacity building industry. The outcome of the relationship is contingent on characteristics of all the involved parties and the nature of the interaction between them. Thus, the behaviour of donors and the capacity building industry may make characteristics of the recipient more entrenched thus reinforcing their effects. We shall return to these issues towards the end of the paper.

The paper is mainly based on a review of transition literature and the author’s own experience from capacity building in Eastern Europe.

2Political Leadership

The stable, regulated Western democracies leave little latitude for transformative leadership. Indeed the very notion of democracy may not correlate positively with strong leadership since the success of liberal democracies consists in a reduction of the elbowroom of powerful individuals (Blondel 1987, Pelinka 1997). However, the situation is clearly different in non-democratic systems, and in systems experiencing rapid and wide-ranging transitions where old patterns of decision-making have collapsed and not yet been replaced by new sets of procedures (Pelinka 1997, Park 2005, Helmerich 2005). Arguably, the breakdown of well-established systems offers ample opportunities for individual actors.

Transition literature is rich in examples of remarkable personal leadership. The foreign policies of the post-Soviet states have been significantly conditioned by those in charge of foreign policy and not only by external and internal environments (Park 2005). The EU accession processes in Central and Eastern Europe have been driven by small elites with little involvement of the public at large (Ekiert and Zielonka 2003). In the economic field Prime Minister Klaus of the Czech Republic (Orenstein 2001) and Deputy Prime Minister Balcerowicz of Poland (Campbell 2002) were able to overcome legacies of the past and pave the way for radical reforms.

By the same token, lack of political leadership is an obstacle to institutional development (Fukuyama 2004) and may have detrimental effects on the transition process. Leaders like Milosevic in Serbia (Thomas 1998), Tudjman in Croatia (Helmerich 2005) and Meciar in Slovakia (Kopstein and Reilly 2003) held up reform processes for several years and isolated their countries from European developments. Also leaders on lower levels who were educated and socialised under the Communist regime have prevented the introduction of new, Western-inspired methods and principles because such innovations would have made their own experience irrelevant and thus been a threat to their positions and status. Apparently, this mechanism to some extent explains the lack of reform of higher education in Eastern Europe (Füllsack 2004).

Over the past 150 years, at least, the issue of the extent to which Western models of governance should be adopted has split political elites in countries of Eastern Europe. Serbia may serve as an illustration.

When Serbia achieved internal autonomy inside the Ottoman Empire, and started to build a domestic administrative apparatus, it had to recruit officials from among the better-educated Serbs living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These imported officials were more interested in a law state on the Austrian model than in representative institutions (Pawlowitch 2002, p. 42). Their greatest achievement was the Serbian Civil Code of 1844 based on the Austrian Allgemeine Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch of 1811. The Habsburg Serbs (or the ‘Germans’ – as was their local nickname) earmarked money to train the best Serbian students abroad. The young Serbs, who mostly went to study in Paris, brought back more than skills – they spoke for a broader outlook on culture and politics. The ‘Parisians’ as they were called promoted French ideals of freedom and democracy as opposed to the Austrian notion of the absolutist law state, which brought them into sharp conflict with their original sponsors, the Serb ‘Germans’ (Batakovic 2000).

However, nationalist Serb politicians distrusted the ways in which ‘Germans’ and ‘Parisians’ (with royal support) aspired to turn Serbia into a pale imitation of a small Western state when the Serbian people had many good institutions of their own. The leader of the Radical Party, and later Prime Minister, Nikola Pasic (1845-1926), often called ‘the Serbian Tomas Masaryk’,advocated a foreign policy relying on Russia and linked to an internal policy that sought to preserve Serbian traditions that were good, rather than satellite status to Austria-Hungary and slavish imitation of Western institutions (Pawlowitch, 2000, p. 71).

The argument between ‘Westerners’ and nationalists runs like a thread through Serbia’s modern history. Recently, the conflict between the late Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and the current Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has been interpreted as one between a Western-oriented moderniser and a Serb traditionalist. Whereas the key political aim of Djindjic was to integrate Serbia into Western structures and base his reform programme on Western support and Western patterns, Kostunica has been more reserved towards the West. For instance in 2000, immediately after having assumed office as Yugoslav president, he portrayed the US and the former Soviet Union as morally and politically equivalent when he stressed that he shared Solzhenitsyn’s disillusionment with 20th-century totalitarian societies, ‘both Soviet and American’ (Cigar 2001, p. 82).

It is sometimes alleged that the political elites in Eastern countries have adopted Western models of governance regarding democracy, the rule of law and a professional civil service, not because of their own intrinsic benefits, but because they were considered efficient means to achieve other external ends, e.g. economic growth, membership in Western institutions, or economic assistance (Offe 1997). Scholars argue that this was the case when the Balkan countries gained independence in the 19th century, and allegedly introduced Western ideas and institutions mainly to make favourable impressions on external patrons (Mishkova 1995). The same kind of argument was heard during the recent round of EU-enlargement when candidate countries were said to adopt formal structures in order not to lose political support in the Council of Ministers (Jacoby 1999).

In the political evolution of the West political and social institutions were valued for their own merits, because they conformed to a set of spiritual norms, for instance the Protestant Ethic (Offe 1997). The discrepancies between East and West in the case of establishing social institutions raise questions about the relationship between outcome and process. Do variations in processes of gestation lead to different outcomes, so that a non-Western method of implementation creates significant differences between ‘the original’ and ‘the imitation’ and increases the likelihood for the replica to be distorted and weakened compared to the prototype (Offe 1997)?

3Administrative Structure

The argument that the nature of domestic bureaucracies influences the ability of Eastern countries to benefit fully from external aid has been heard for decades.

Immediately after the First World War the US Rockefeller Foundation tried to support the development of a modern health care system in Czechoslovakia. One issue that was problematic for the Foundation’s work in that country was the bureaucratic system inherited from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Within weeks of his arrival in Czechoslovakia the Foundation’s representative wrote: ‘It takes weeks and sometimes many months to accomplish anything. The whole system is bureaucratic in the extreme. … The Minister is disposed to change the methods but realizes that it is a difficult thing to do, as it is part of the whole state system. It comes from the whole principle of government. All authority rests with a very few and the system of protocol is designed to protect those who hold the responsibility. The enormous delays in getting things done discourages men who are really interested in their work …’ (Page 2001, pp. 281-282).

Circumstances like the ones described here may still make it difficult for Eastern countries to benefit from foreign assistance. In Croatia, and Serbia only half of the EU funds earmarked in 2001 for projects in public administration was disbursed in 2004 (DRN 2004, Statskonsult 2005). The ability to assimilate aid seems to have become increasingly weaker over the 2001-2004 period (Statskonsult 2005). One obvious interpretation of this state of affairs is that as more complex reform issues are addressed over time and the volume of assistance grows, aid absorption becomes increasingly vulnerable to bottlenecks in the public administration.

In Balkan countries projects have come up against a common feature of the local administrative apparatus, the absence of communication and coordination

A consultant responsible for a cross-ministerial project reports that ‘experience has been mixed. In several ministries there is a communication ‘black hole’. People do not share information. The word is not spread’. In ministries that have separate units for external assistance or externally funded projects there appears to be little communication between these bodies and the parts of the ministry that are responsible for forming and implementing policies. Thus the projects may not significantly promote domestic reforms or enhance the capacities of the local public administration.

The noticeable centralization of the public administration as well as limited interaction between employees and political appointees in recipient countries have also influenced decision-making on foreign assistance. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of civil servants engaged in externally-funded projects who have been reluctant to approach their superiors in project-related matters, let alone speak their mind in the presence of political appointees. The fact that only ministers or the government plenary are entitled to make decisions has considerably delayed projects.

A senior official of a Balkans country who until recently headed an interministerial working party on EU-integration complained that the strong centralisation of authority makes it almost impossible to reach the decision-making level in several ministries. This in turn hinders smooth cross ministerial coordination and efficient management of EU matters.

A key problem in several transition countries is lack of institutional capacity. Local civil servants have been engaged in externally funded projects on top of their ordinary workloads, which has led to lack of dedication and in-depth involvement in reform efforts (Bailey and de Propris 2004). High turnover among employees, often as a result of poor pay conditions, has often disrupted project implementation and reduced effectiveness and impact (IPS 1999). Simultaneously, lack of competence and analytical skills make it difficult for the recipient countries to identify their needs (Bailey and de Propris 2004) and, as a corollary, to secure ownership to the assistance package.

However, the capacity of governmental bodies to absorb foreign aid differs across the public service (Papadimitriou and Phinnemore 2004). Available evidence indicates that there may be systematic variations vertically between administrative levels and horizontally across policy sectors. An evaluation of the EU Phare programme concluded that while most of the projects directly addressing the central level of government performed deficiently, local government projects scored considerably better (IPS 1999). The evaluator argues that this pattern may be an indication that central government institutions are more prone to political volatility and risks than local government bodies (IPS 1999).

In the Western Balkans the progress of reforms regarding the state apparatus, the justice sector and public administration, is significantly slower than developments in the areas of trade, energy and infrastructure (Calic 2005). Arguably, this pattern is also reflected in the actual absorption of external assistance. In Serbia, for instance, the percentage of aid actually spent was significantly lower in the area of administrative reform than in other sectors (Statskonsult 2005). The discrepancy can be interpreted in the light of data from other parts of the world indicating that support for capacity building tends to be successful in sectors with clear goals, well-known[j1] techniques, measurable results, and strong lobbies pressing for reforms of the administration (World Bank 2005). These features are not easily replicable, particularly not in the area of general public administration.